by Tod Davies
“Lily had left it behind. Along with everything else she owned.
“Except the Key. And except the child who would be born too soon.”
That was me, of course, that baby. It was no surprise that when Will came to this part of the story, a deep emotion rose in me, through my chest, up my throat, and into the back of my eyes. But my own birth is such a small part of the story. It doesn’t count for much against the greater tale. That is the story of the birth of a new Arcadia, the one Lily tended so anxiously, the one that I inherited, along with a duty of care toward it. The one that Aspern Grayling so despises, and aches to dismantle in favor of…what? “In favor of Power,” he would say. It’s difficult for me, who feels gently toward him, while sternly toward his works. Didn’t he and I come out of the same disasters? How can I help looking at him with love, even while he demands the destruction of everything I’ve pledged to protect and foster?
He says that’s why he does plot against me. He says that it’s my weakness that makes me unfit to lead.
But is it truly a weakness, I wonder? And was it Lily’s? Sixty years later, past the events in those winter mountains, I feel the ground firm under my feet. It’s not weakness, Aspern, I tell him those rare times we meet in secret to see if our differences can be resolved. It’s strength. And it’s the only way forward.
“Is it?” he says to me scornfully. “You who let the murderer of your own mother live?”
Wilder stumbled when he came to this part of the story. It was too much for him. I saw that, and helped him. I picked up the thread of his tale.
It’s understandable that he would fail. But I tell him he can’t let himself fail forever. Too much depends on his finally being strong enough to own his experience. All his experience. And his experience, of course, is mine.
If anything has made me fit to be queen, it is that I own these experiences, everything from this moment on until the Death I can see ahead of me. My own Death will be a peaceful one, I know that. Unlike the Death of my mother. Of Lily.
When I say this to Wilder, his head droops, and I fear, sometimes, that I’ll lose him to despair. But I needn’t fear. At the last minute, I know Wilder will remember he is a bard, and remember his job, and, hard as it is to face what he has done, he’ll tell the tale whole.
But that first night, around the Winter Hearth, it was too soon, too hard for Wilder, no matter how strong his professional pride. So I had pity on him, my partner in making the stories of Arcadia anew, and I took up the story myself.
Lily smelled disaster in the cold air. She told me, Kim told me, Devindra told me. They all knew. They would have to get over the mountains, somehow, before…before…before….
I know Lily shivered, thinking about it. Kim looked up at her sharply, then looked away with a thoughtful expression. Clare slept with her head in Lily’s lap, and Lily methodically smoothed the child’s hair as she did.
Then it happened. “Look!” someone called out. And look they did. They saw a rocket go up from Megalopolis. Then two. Then three.
“They’re leaving,” one of the women said dully. “Them with all their science,” another one said—the one who had found the abundant mushrooms that fed hundreds that night.
“They know,” a third woman said.
“And they woulda left us lot behind,” Kim said, her eyes sparkling indignantly. A murmur of agreement went around the fires.
Lily stayed sunk deep in thought. She remembered that other night she had seen the rockets take off from Megalopolis for the False Moon. Soon—two, three nights at the most—she hoped they would be in that meadow, on the Arcadian side of the Ceres. And then…home. She would be able to see home from there.
The thought filled her with a sadness she couldn’t name. As if she knew it wouldn’t be so—not the way it seemed to her that night.
Reaching gently into her pocket, so as not to disturb Clare, Lily grasped the Key.
The wind blew.
Then the silence of the throng was cut by a gasp, a sharp intake of breath from a thousand throats.
“Look!” they cried, as if with one voice. As my dearest Devindra, the scientist and Distinguished Professor, has often said, this was the moment when she realized, to the depths of her being, that everything she had learned in the laboratories of Megalopolis had been wrong. “And if not wrong, then limited,” she says now thoughtfully to her students as they sit around her cross-legged on the wide green of the college lawn. “The wrong picture. More than the wrong picture. The wrong frame.”
Because then, what stood before them all, at the edge of the ridge, overlooking the great city, were two doors, one open and one shut. Two doors that just stood there, as if it were perfectly normal for two doors to appear at the edge of a ridge in the mountains, framing the view below.
At least, that was what the one on the left did. Open wide on its cold stone frame, it showed a view all the way down to the sea.
All was silent. “No one went near the doors. You can imagine it was like witchcraft seeing them hang there!” So said the scientist Devindra much later, she who had spent her early life scorning the idea of sorcery and magic, and who now stared at…what? Was it proof? Proof of what?
A few of the women crossed themselves. They didn’t know why. They only remembered that their grandmothers and their great-grandmothers had done the same when they were in distress. These women were now in distress themselves. And they did not know how to meet that distress. There was nothing to meet it in what they’d been taught.
“What’s it mean?” Kim whispered. Clare was awake now, and clinging frightened to Lily, who murmured soothing words to her, and gently put her aside. Lily knew what she had to do. She had the Key, and the Key told her. Dusting herself off, she stood. Taking a deep breath, she thrust her hand back in her pocket, once again grasping the Key.
Another deep breath. And then she walked, slowly, toward the closed door.
No one stirred. Lily kept up her walk. Then she was in front of both doors, staring at them in silence.
I think she knew then. I think she knew all her fate. It was uncanny. It was…Aspern Grayling would deny it ever happened. He wasn’t there, but he would deny it ever happened, and blind people would believe him, because it’s easier to believe him than to make room in their tiny worlds for what truly Is.
Lily stood there. “Oh, it was as if she were having a conversation with them doors, Soph!” Kim told me later. The door on the left, made of some light silver metal, swung even more widely open in the wind, as if inviting Lily to step through. Through it, Megalopolis shone like the strand of jewels she had left behind.
The door on the right was a thick wooden one, carved all over with curious animals of a type never before seen: half human/half bird, half human/half lion, half human/half ape. There were angels carved across the lintel, and devils and demi-devils down the sides of the frame. And the carving was so cunning that all these figures seemed to stir into life as Lily stood there.
On the left-hand side of that door was a burnished wooden handle. And beneath that handle was a lock. Lily paused only for a moment, taking the deepest breath she could, and though she never told anyone what went through her mind at that moment, Kim, back at the fire, could see her thinking to herself, “Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out…” With each breath she walked closer to the door. She took out the Key. She fit it to the lock. It joined the lock as if it had never been apart.
“Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in….”
Lily turned the Key.
There was a cry from Clare. A trio of shaggy ponies appeared at the edge of the ridge, drawn by the force of the event. They were wild ponies, left from the ancient stock that the old women and men of the mountains had bred long ago.
The ponies stood shaking their manes in the wind. One of them, a black pony with a thick, ragged gray mane, let out a loud trumpet of a neigh.
Lily swallowed. She put her fingers up against the door gently, against
the figure of a woman with a horse’s body—a centaur. As she did, the carved woman neighed in answer to the pony. Startled, Lily would have drawn back, but the carving’s front arms seemed to reach out and grab her thumb. Then, as Lily moved forward, the right door swung open. It swung open wide…wider…wider still… expanding across the ridge until it covered the other door, obliterating it from sight, and stretched out and out and out until it was a carved wooden frame, with wooden angels and devils chasing each other around and around, stretching out to reframe the view. Lily followed it until it stopped. And the carving of the woman centaur let her go.
Lily took one step back and gazed through the open door.
That was the moment of the Great Earthquake. As everyone on the mountain watched, Megalopolis began to shake and groan and split down to its roots. So deep and terrible was the Great Earthquake that even there, on the ridge in the Ceres Mountains, the terrified people could hear the earth’s cries…and the screams of the people as they ran to and fro, with nowhere to cling safely, nowhere to hide.
“It went on for hours,” Kim said later. “Or anyways, that were the way it seemed.” In fact, it lasted no more than ten minutes. And when it was over, the lights of Megalopolis were out, to be succeeded, quite shortly, by red and orange flames. Here and there at first. Then everywhere.
This was the moment of the Great Silence, which Arcadian physicists still find such a fruitful, and often frustrating, part of the landscape of natural fact. Everywhere was silence. Had anyone wanted to, they could not have uttered a sound.
“I tried it meself,” Kim has said to me many times. “Couldn’ta said a word if I’d a-wanted to. No.”
Not a bird sang, not a frog croaked, not a wolf howled. Not even the flames crackled, now consuming what had been Megalopolis. They did their job in silence.
Burning, the flames raced across the picture in the frame. From three sides, they raced toward where the missiles had taken off. And then the Great Silence was rent, as if from top to bottom, by a Great Noise so loud that it seemed like Silence itself.
“It was no noise like you and I know, no, nothin’ like that. It was so loud it was quiet. Dead quiet. It rushed past us like a hurricane, even far away as we were. And it left some of us deaf, as if it exploded our eardrums, from the inside.”
Then there was a Howling, as if the whole of the Landscape in the Frame, as if the Whole of the World were crying out in pain and regret for what had led to this, the acts that had ended in this…and then there was a loud rushing sound—“Like if you could hear under water in your bath when you pull out the plug…” said Kim—and the blazing flames below went out, in patches, one by one, bowled over by a greater force. “And we didn’t know what it was till things cleared up and we could see again—oh, that was a lot later, Sophy, you were almost born then—and we saw it was a huge wave, a tidal wave from the sea, and it just mowed everything down.”
But no one on the ridge, that night, knew about the Great Wave. Arcadian physicists later hypothesized that the Megalopolitans had prepared some vast power source, which these natural disasters had twisted and turned to their own end. And their end was the End of Megalopolis. For that was what it was.
“For awhile, then, we thought it was the end of us, Sophy, dear,” Kim said to me later. “But it wasn’t. Not by a long shot. We were tougher than that, all right. Some of us.”
But not all. Because that was when Winter, called too soon to every nook and cranny of the World by this loud cry of Force, strode across the land. And he came first to the mountains, where he is more at home than anywhere else. He came quickly, in thick white sheets of snow and freezing wind, and by the morning, there were many dead of the cold and of the sheer terror of it all.
Then came the great scramble for shelter among those who were left. There was a moment where the fear was so great that it killed more people than the mountain, more people than Winter himself. This sobered those left, which was lucky for them. They remembered they needed each other, and it was that understanding that let them survive. That and the Key.
Winter lasted months. A mountain that, in fairer weather, could have been crossed in two days now became impassable. Lily, who had known the mountain as a child, was able to lead her now small group to a clutch of caves. It seemed so long ago since she and Colin had played robbers inside of them.
The three little ponies were with them. No one knew why they followed Clare, but they did, as did every horse she ever came near from then on. And this was a piece of luck. The ponies knew, after many generations wintering on that mountain, where to dig to find the tender shoots still hidden, where to look for acorns and pine nuts, where to find streams with fish hiding sluggishly in icy inlets. One of the ponies proved to be a mare about to foal, and so there was milk.
“Three long months of this,” Kim said, shuddering at the painful memory of it. She has never had her health back again, after those months.
“Then, you were born,” she said.
I never tired of hearing that part of the tale when I was young. And so, that first night around the Hearth in the Round Hall, I made Kim take up the last bit of the tale.
She hesitated, of course, because she was worried (she told me later) that she was no storyteller such as Wilder, but then, “A’ course it’s me as should tell it, I was there, warn’t I? I’ve as much right to the story as he does. It’s my story, too, innit? The story of thems I love.” So my nurse, Kim took up the tale that night. And I think it was best told in her more homelike way.
“Born in a cave, you were, with just me and Clare and the ponies looking on, all anxious. Your mother did it all, and never said a word—hours it took, and she never said a word. And you only cried once when you came out, like you were surprised. When it was over, we wrapped you up and gave you to her and we cut the cord, and after that you were still. I was worried it meant there was something wrong, but Lily, she knew it was all right. And then, oh, I don’t know, but it was spring, somehow, things got better bit by bit, until one morning it was warm again! Warm! And the birds singing! And sunshine everywhere! We could see down the mountain now. Where Megalopolis had been, now was just one big bright blue-green sea.
SOPHIA THE WISE WAS BORN IN THE CERES MOUNTAINS
“Your mother was still weak, but she was always stronger than the rest of us even when she was that way—you know what I mean, you’re a little like that yourself—and she made us all get up and led us to a place, all green and covered with new buds, which seemed to make her sad. She’d been there last, she said, at a Feast. We don’t have them now. I dunno why. But there we were, where one had been. And then we walked down the other side of the Mountain into Arcadia.”
Of course I knew the rest. We all knew the rest. But I begged Kim to go on. And the rest of her audience sat rapt.
“Oh, then, sad times, you know. You all know all this from the history books, don’t you?”
“Go on, Kim.” I said, urging her. “Do go on.”
Kim sighed, but she went on, lacing her fingers together on her lap there by the fire. “Well then. It was all a mess, all of it. From what I heard, the place, our place, this ’ere Arcadia, never got over being occupied like that by the Great Empire—we Megalopolitans could be dead cruel, and a place never gets over a thing like that. Lily’s ma had been a big…I’m not sure what…some kind of leader, like they had in the old days. So when we got down there, there was nobody in charge, like. And your ma, she was like magic, Soph. (I mean, yer majesty, sorry, I keep forgettin’.) All yer ’ad to do was look at ’er to know it. They all knew it. So they asked your mother to be their queen and lead them.”
“And she said no,” I said, keeping my voice expressionless.
“She said no,” Kim nodded. “Three times they asked. Three times she said no. Finally, they just wore her out—that’s what I think. And she spent all her time trying to get everything steady. Which wasn’t easy. If you ask me, a bigger group of fruitcakes I’d never seen than th
at court of Arcadia. But your mother told me to be patient. She said it would be all right in the end.”
“But it wasn’t.”
“No. It wasn’t. Three times when you were small (I mean, when Queen Sophia was a royal tyke), she tried to step down, and three times the cities begged her to stay on. Then was the fourth. She was firm this time. She said she would keep the Key, but step down she must, and step down she would. She had never wanted, she said, to be a queen.”
“No,” I said thoughtfully. And then added, “Tell me what happened then.”
“Aw, Soph…I mean…aw, never mind. You know what happened then. You know I don’t like to…”
“Tell me,” I said. And the room around the Central Hearth went absolutely still. “And tell them, too,” I added softly. Kim looked at me through her eyes swimming wet with tears. For what? For her old friend. For me, her nursling. For Arcadia itself, Arcadia that surrounded her, listening to her tale.
“Ah, well, then,” Kim said, resigned, wiping her eyes with determination, “she told them she was going. Told ’em they were going to have to stand on their own, sink or swim. She and I were laughing together in the throne room—she was so relieved to think all that would be over soon. I don’t remember where Clare was…”
“She was with the horses, in the meadows near Wrykyn, getting ready for the Fair.”
“Yeah, of course. That’s where she was. And you were with Devindra somewhere, you were that interested in ’er experiments, even then, a little tyke like that, we all wondered at it. But of course you were Lily’s daughter. A queen, ye know.”
We were both quiet then. We both knew I hadn’t wanted to be a queen.
“Go on,” I said. That was when Wilder pulled his bard’s cloak over his head, in sorrow at what he knew she would say. His fellows nearby looked at him, doubtful, and pulled away, leaving him seated there alone.
